The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission may soon be signing agreements with natural gas drilling companies, both for the removal of gas from beneath commission properties and for the sale of water from commission-owned lakes to gas drillers.

The commission’s new Natural Gas Leasing Program, approved Monday in a special meeting of the state Board of Fish and Boat Commissioners, requires staff to come back to the board for approval on any leases before they are executed and specifically will not permit any surface developments on commission land.

The equally new Water Access Program clears the way for staff to sell “access to water resources owned or controlled by the commission.”

Board President William R. Worobec abstained from discussion and voting on the new programs, citing business relationships within the Marcellus Shale industry, and Commissioner G. Warren Elliott was the only member of the 10-man board to vote against both proposals.

“I have a fundamental concern with the (commission) contracting with and receiving funds from companies that the agency has regulatory oversight and enforcement powers over,” Elliott explained his votes.

However, commented Commission Executive Director John Arway, commission properties are relatively small and many fall within larger areas already planned for drilling, which could draw the gas from beneath commission properties without any consent from the agency and, lacking any leases, without any payments to the commission.

“This is being drive by gas companies knocking on our door,” he said. “Our plan was not to go out and market our properties.”

Arway added, “We’re not going to stop these developments by saying no. If we have the opportunity to benefit rather than lose, we have the obligation.”

He described the potential revenue from gas leases and water sales as some of the “alternative sources of funding” he’s been seeking to supplement funds from the sale of fishing and boating licenses.

Arway said “highest priority” for money raised through the two new programs would be placed on the repair of 16 commission-owned dams deemed high hazard because of their urgent need of repair. Some of the gas leases and water removal likely will take place on lands associated with those dams.

Commissioner Steven Ketterer worried that the money would not be allocated to law enforcement to better maintain a watch on the burgeoning natural gas industry, saying, “We owe it to the citizens of Pennsylvania that we’re protecting them.”

Arway replied, “There’s strong potential for funding law enforcement through a user-based fee.”

He noted that a meeting on Tuesday with representatives from several statewide conservation and sportsmen’s organizations will develop strategies for obtaining additional funding sources based on the natural gas industry.

Commissioner Edward Mascharka III, who also voted against the water sales, described the gas leasing concept as “very valid,” but said, “We need to tread lightly and act cautiously when we deal with water. We need to think about what those future outcomes (of “taking and degrading the water”) are and I don’t know that we have the technologies to get that done.”

Although Commissioner Leonard Lichvar voted in favor of the two new program, he said he did so “with reservations.”

He explained, “The die has been cast. Our state decision-makers and elected officials have already opened the state for drilling long before we were ready for it and they have compounded the problem by their complete failure to enact any legitimate impact fee from the industry.

“Both of these failures compel us as an agency to control our own destiny in both oversight and income generation within our best ability to do so.”